As someone who has never actually played a Kojima game, his game always strike me as being really out there whenever I hear about them. Like almost to the point of being dumb. I always assumed that it's that aspect of them that people liked about them.
@Octane i feel like with kojima there's two camps. Those that worship him and every pretentious thing he does. You'll find these people in Starbucks watching the trailers on their macbooks. Then the people that the more you play his games, the less you like them.
There's never just 2 groups.
I just don't know enough about Kojima to have confidence in this. Like do we know how much of the game design in the MGS games he was responsible for? I have no idea. For all I know he could be a bit like Keiji Inafune, who as far as I can tell got a lot of credit simply because he was the business frontman for a franchise.
If you look at how Kojima is credited in his various games, it's usually "Writer", "Director" or "Producer". So basically my worry is that he hasn't done any of the actual game design part for decades and that the MGS series was successful because he just had good designers with him. Well what if Sony gave him so much freedom that he forgets that he needs actual good game designers so we end up basically with a movie and almost no interesting gameplay at all.
I enjoy cinematic games but I really dislike playing something that should've just been a movie instead. Like Dear Esther for example. No reason for that to be a "game" at all.
The fact that we've seen no gameplay but he's focused on how many famous actors it has is what makes me worry.
@Dezzy@Tsurii i find the opinion “why isnt this just a movie” problematic. I mean the answer is just because they want too. Is story telling limited to just passive viewing? even if its just a walking simulators like dear esther, does the fact it focuses on telling a story enough reason to say, “well just remove player agency since all you do is walk”? I think the hangup is that its being called a “game” but in that case then its all semantic then Isnt it? if its called an interactive storybook should it still be just a movie instead? Or does that satisfy the objections to those kinds of “games”
@Dezzy Kojima reached the peak of movieness with MGS4. The entire game was 30 minute+ movies followed by 15 minutes of gameplay (lie prone, crawl on the ground through 4 map sections. Next cutscene.) I would like MGS4 a lot more if I could just turn off the gameplay and watch the cutscenes
I think he is pretty hands on with the games....and I think that's exactly what's wrong with them. He's an egotistical primadonna backed by financial and critical success which makes him even more full of himself. I gather he's a really nice guy, but he can plow through a million like it's a fiver and still have nothing to show for it but flashiness. He's capable of designing deep gameplay but he tends to be too ambitious beyond what he can deliver so you get a weird mix of excessively (unlikably?) complicated gameplay systems, most of which are unnecessary because the scope of their use was cut. He can't budget and define a fixed scope of both Hollywood level cinema plus gameplay above industry average ambition. MGS5 give hints of what kind of amazing ideas were in his head....but he never really got it translated into a functioning video game without another 10 years and billion dollars to do it. That was Konami. They had a leash on him. Sony, I fear just gives him however much money he wants for whatever he wants because they're Sony, and his project is probably more valuable "coming when it's finished" than it is actually on shelves. He'd bleed the battery division dry and still have no game, if given a chance. It doesn't help that he always wanted to be a film director.
@Tsurii Oh, great, Kojima and Del Toro on one project? Just what any project needs: Two obsessives with egos bigger than all Japan both reveling in the same brand of "this makes sense to nobody so natrually it will win every arty award invented" "creativity" (that I'm pretty sure makes a lot more sense if you're drugged to the gills.) Please look forward to Death Stranding, releasing on Playstation IX in 2043. It will in fact consist of one level that takes 3 hours to beat, but you can spend hours searching for collectibles, and it will be the most artful level you've ever experienced. (Translation: Yeah the project was garbage, we scrapped it after 40 years of development, and had only enough money left to make this level. We were going to rename the game "The Magic Circle" but legal tells us that's copyright.)
@diwdiws: I believe the terms for that content are "visual novel", "interactive story", etc. But they're not selling interactive stories and visual novels they sell it as a game. A big game. A deep game. So it either has a big, deep game, that people expect due to MGS, or it doesn't, but they aren't showing it and talk a whole lot about stories. It's fine if it's a graphic novel, but I don't think Sony would be spending that kind of money on a one-time disposable interactive story. David Cage stories aren't given that kind of budget for example. They're not cheap, but cheaper than a Kojima budget, but that's not with DS is being billed as.
MGSV kind of gave me my fill of Kojima for one lifetime. I was tolerant of MGS4. Ground Zeroes almost seemed cool but once the story went off the rails at the end with the Paz thing I left that game thinking "ok, that's it, I'm done with Kojima." When I got MGSV free I felt like giving it another try, "ok, maybe it gets better" and what do I start with? A weird zombiless survival horror in a hospital where the human soldiers are portrayed like zombies, followed by a freaking fire demon chase in an all too serious chase for the absurdity. While I "get" the fire demon story wise based on prior series knowledge, it just doesn't fit well in a game that then dumps you in the desert for a military simulator. I kind of walked away again thinking "nope...not Kojima..."
Although I will still love MGS for providing really good stealth gameplay and some gripping stories. Even V had an alright story, although it's not as good as the other games.
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@Dezzy@Tsurii i find the opinion “why isnt this just a movie” problematic. I mean the answer is just because they want too. Is story telling limited to just passive viewing? even if its just a walking simulators like dear esther, does the fact it focuses on telling a story enough reason to say, “well just remove player agency since all you do is walk”? I think the hangup is that its being called a “game” but in that case then its all semantic then Isnt it? if its called an interactive storybook should it still be just a movie instead? Or does that satisfy the objections to those kinds of “games”
Obviously "game" is just a semantic artifact from how the industry started.
It does need to be interactive in a way where the user has a variety of options so that different choices affect the experience differently. Dear Esther doesn't really do that. It has just 1 option at pretty much every point, which amounts to being fake interactivity in my mind. (and therefore should've just been a TV/movie product)
I should say that I don't actually think Death Stranding will be just a walking simulator. I imagine there'll be a gameplay side to it revealed sooner or later. I'm just very skeptical because we've seen a lot of material but still no gameplay at all. The emphasis in trailers tends to indicate what the developers consider most important.
Kojima really does give me the vibe of someone who's charmingly childish (not in immaturity/stupidity but in freeness) in his games. Sometimes they say something with truth and/or meaning to them and other times I see him writing a character who is a naked lady that apparently breathes through her skin.
Death Stranding doesn't give me that vibe so far. It seems like it's trying really hard to not tell me jack/or very little at that. Which while cool for some people, I think it's pretty annoying. My favorite trailer was when they actually showed gameplay because then I actually had a grasp on it without having to perform a highschool annotation on a trailer.
The good news is that we may not have to wait that long at all to find out if it's good or not. If true, I still expect it to slip into 2020, as one of the last PS4 games. Days Gone, Ghost, and TLOU2 in 2019, with Death Stranding in early 2020. But who knows, maybe they'll surprise us all with a 2019 release date
''Kojima-san mentioned near the end that the game is still on track to release when planned, which is the year in which Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is set. If that’s the case, it would be 2019.''
even if its just a walking simulators like dear esther, does the fact it focuses on telling a story enough reason to say, “well just remove player agency since all you do is walk”?
Yes. If the gameplay does nothing to enhance the story, and the story does nothing to enhance the gameplay, but the gameplay is hampered or scaled back in order to put an emphasis on the story, then what is the point of there being any gameplay at all?
I know I'm personally against games with limited gameplay interaction, simply because story is such a subjective thing that I don't know whether or not I'll enjoy that part of any given game until I start playing it, while expectations also play a part into whether or not I'll enjoy it - the more focus a story gets, the better it needs to be to warrant that time. And if it's the only engaging aspect, then it better be a damn great story.
But I don't have to worry about that in movies....because I don't watch movies. =P Except for Marvel flicks, but only because they've kept up a consistant level of quality, and I know what to expect.
But even if I did, I do know that I'd go in with completely different expectations, and overall, they're shorter experiences than even most walking sims tend to be. That's not to say there are any games I would think would be better as movies (I mean, geez, you pointed out Dear Ester, that would've been a total flop if they made it a movie. That was boring as hell. It's creators needed a lesson in pacing before the topic of player agency even comes up), but in the case of Death's Stranding...at least it could very easily win an IFC Spirit Award if he opted to make it an arthouse flick.
I think Tsurii already talked enough about why we'd expect more from the creator or MGS, but it really can't be said enough: He knows how to direct good games that also have interesting, out-there stories that no one else could really replicate. He knows how important it is to marry story with gameplay, subvert expectations, break the fourth wall, and generally keep people engaged and entertained throughout...expectations are gonna be high for Death Stranding, perhaps unreasonably so. He may have a new company, but that doesn't quite mean the whole band's back together. Maybe they gotta start off with something less complicated from a gameplay standpoint while letting the director focuses on the story?
Either way, I'm not interested in Death Stranding, but I do look forward to whatever comes afterwards...
But I don't have to worry about that in movies....because I don't watch movies. =P Except for Marvel flicks, but only because they've kept up a consistant level of quality, and I know what to expect.
Lol that's literally identical to me. The only movies I've watched in the last 5 years have been Marvel and Star Wars. And since the Last Jedi I've ditched Star Wars so now I only watch Marvel films.
So Sony are doing a "beta" for crossplatform play now.
Thanks to the backlash.
So whenever someone tries to say that "companies don't listen to backlash from online comments", (Many people here love to throw that line around lately ), just show them that lol
I wonder if this crossplay backing down has anything to do with Bethesda claiming PS4 wouldn't get Elder Scrolls Legends without crossplay? The timing does seem quite coincidental, especially since people were just starting to give up on arguing about it. Well regardless, all I need is Rocket League crossplay and I'll be happy.
@link3710 Eh, I don't think anyone cares that much about ES: Legends, let alone be it the deciding factor in this matter. As for Bethesda, they wouldn't withhold it anyway, 80 million gamers is too much to pass up on.
I would imagine part of the reason why Sony has backed down on the anti-crossplay was likely due to the fact they most probably have a new console coming out in the next two or three years, so they are going to want to be seen as pro-consumer in the run up of the next generation.
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